How to Make Strategic Big Bets

Wake Forest University was doing just fine. Its national profile was rising, and so was its enrollment. But campus leaders knew that it was losing desirable students to rival institutions because it had no engineering program, and its science facilities were showing their age.

The university was already in the process of relocating its medical school to a clutch of disused tobacco factories and warehouses in downtown Winston-Salem, a few miles from the campus. Space in the complex was available — and so was a tantalizing possibility. The state of North Carolina was offering tax credits to repurpose historic buildings like these. But the credits were about to expire.

“We had to move swiftly,” says Nathan O. Hatch, Wake Forest’s president. “That, in a sense, forced our hand to say, Are we going to do this or not?”

The opportunity raised tough questions: What kind of programs belonged downtown? Could they lure undergraduates from the bucolic main campus to a more urban setting? Would a project there make financial sense?

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In other words, Wake Forest faced the same issue that many colleges confront these days: How do you ensure that a big strategic move will raise the institution rather than wreck it?

Being bold can be a gamble for presidents and colleges alike. “Making the wrong bet can be obviously harmful to an individual leader’s career,” says David W. Strauss, a principal in the Art & Science Group, which does strategic consulting for colleges. “In some cases it can be a downright existential threat to an institution.”

Some colleges start programs or build facilities simply because they see their peers doing so, or because they feel they have to try something, anything, to turn around their fortunes. “They just float out these new programs and see what they get,” says Richard A. Hesel, another principal with the Art & Science Group. “That’s a foolish way to do it.”

It’s more efficient and less expensive to quantify the risks and the rewards before making the investment, he says, “because they can be measured.”

Just as there is no one solution that works for every college, there is no simple checklist of steps that guarantees success. But talking with the leaders of some institutions that have recently made big changes reveals crucial factors to keep in mind: starting from an empirical foundation, testing assumptions, and bringing key stakeholders on board.

The most important step is making sure it’s the right one. A college must examine whether what it’s considering fits its mission and its identity. It must research the demand for the innovation it wants to introduce and look for empirical evidence that it will be well received. It must determine whether it’s able to take advantage of its new strategy, or if it’s out of reach.

The research that Wake Forest commissioned from Art & Science indicated that an engineering program, and other science programs added to its liberal-arts mix, would convert more applicants into freshmen. That gave university leaders confidence that the rewards of investing in a new facility were worth the risk.

This January, Wake Forest held its first classes in what’s now known as Wake Downtown. A refurbished tobacco building houses new undergraduate biomedical-science programs and will house an engineering program to open this fall. The tax credits reduced the construction costs from more than $50 million to about $26 million.

The project’s financial success depends in part on the new programs attracting new students, but the Art & Science research indicated that if the university built it, they would come. So far the signs are encouraging. Early-decision applications are up 47 percent this year, says Rogan Kersh, the provost, with “very strong, evident interest in the engineering and biomedical-science programs specifically.”

Simply renovating or replacing buildings can also benefit from a strategic approach. When leaders at Malcolm X College, a campus of the City Colleges of Chicago, set about planning a new building six years ago, they knew that they could probably continue to count on plenty of students. The two-year college focuses on health care, and the Chicago area was projected to add 84,000 health-care jobs over the next decade. But what kind of jobs would they be, and what kind of skills would be needed? “We needed to get focused and have the appropriate infrastructure that was necessary to prepare those students for those jobs,” says David A. Sanders, interim president of Malcolm X.

The college embarked on extensive conversations with employers and with peer institutions that helped shape the new $251-million School of Health Sciences building. In response to those discussions, the building features a simulated hospital suite with an emergency room, operating room, and wards for intensive care and obstetrics.

The faux facilities allow the college “to pressure-test our students” on what they learn in class, Mr. Sanders says, so that they’re “an asset to employers on Day 1.” Leaders at nearby Rush University Medical Center made other key suggestions, such as including more open study space for students.

Discussions with employers also helped form the curriculum. Home health-care visits are anticipated to become more common thanks to the aging of baby boomers, so Malcolm X now has a program for training community health workers, complete with a mock apartment.

Officials of the City Colleges of Chicago also relied on data to determine how to proceed with the project, although data don’t always result in an iron law. Plans had initially called for a veterinary-technician program, but a survey of area employers indicated little demand, so it was scuttled.

Data for Malcolm X’s mortuary-science program didn’t indicate the demand it would need to continue, but a survey of funeral homes found that the college offered the only such degree in the area. The program “could have been cut because it didn’t meet one data element,” Mr. Sanders says. But by looking more closely, “we were able to say, yes, this program is absolutely needed.”

It is one thing for college presidents and their staffs to come up with plans for a strategic move, and another to get it approved and make it work. That’s where the board and the faculty come in. No big bet will pay off if those key stakeholders — and likely skeptics — can’t be converted to cheerleaders and collaborators.

Leaders at Maryville University, a private institution in St. Louis, saw the future in small screens. By using tablet technology and learning software, their theory went, they could teach a new generation of students in a way that worked with how they already absorbed most information outside the classroom. Learning apps and interactive technology could also allow professors to customize material for different learning styles. After all, decades of research on the brain and learning backs up the idea that “there’s no way that you can bring 50 or 60 or 100 people into a room, teach them one way, and expect them all to understand,” says Mark Lombardi, the president.

In 2014 he and his staff began developing a plan to equip every student with an iPad loaded with learning apps, and to put its entire faculty through two weeks of professional development on learning theory and creating electronic course content.

They needed board approval.

Mr. Lombardi decided to show, not tell. In addition to briefing the trustees on the plan, he and his staff demonstrated the learning apps and shared data that backed up their thinking. One particular data point seemed to do the trick: “Students who were born on or after the year 2000, for them smartphones and iPads and other tablet technology were just part of the ether, and their expectation was that those would be important parts of whatever they do in their lives,” he says. Several board members “looked at that slide and went, ‘Well, there it is. That says it all in terms of Maryville and the students we’ll be recruiting.’ "

The board signed off on the initiative and, eventually, about $10 million over several years to support the project, including more than $4 million to upgrade the campus wireless network.

Winning over the faculty was another matter. The initiative had been inspired by “pied pipers” who had already been using technology in their teaching, but many professors were skeptical.

Maryville leaders held forums and formed committees that included both early adopters and “fence sitters,” Mr. Lombardi says. Some faculty members viewed the turn to technology as a critique of the way they had long been teaching instead of as a new tool they could use.

Making the weeks of professional development a paid part of faculty contracts signaled that the administration was serious about making the initiative work and making it stick.

Early results appear promising. Freshman enrollment at Maryville in fall of 2016 rose 45 percent over the previous year. While student-learning data are still being compiled, Stacy Donovan, an assistant professor of biology, saw a 9-percent improvement in multiple-choice assessment scores in students she taught with a tablet.

The one thing many colleges can’t do these days is stand pat. The turbulent environment of higher education demands that they distinguish themselves from their competition, make plain their worth to their students and their communities, and try to plan for the unpredictable decades ahead.

Perhaps the biggest challenge that faces leaders looking to make a big strategic move is inertia — the kind that develops on college campuses as it does at few other institutions. At Maryville, as at many universities, some faculty and staff members saw smartphones and tablets as detriments in the classroom, not as a possible future for teaching. Also, enrollment was already up, and the annual budget was running a surplus. “We had a number of people saying, Hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Mr. Lombardi says.

But with higher education under increasing financial and societal pressure, now is the time for bold, but well-considered, moves. Wake Forest had been doing just fine, but it’s important not to rest on those laurels, says Mr. Hatch, the president. “Often those universities who prosper are those who, given their tradition, given their identity, and given their location, are looking for opportunities to say, How do we, in our situation, become better?”

What most colleges consider bold moves are too timid, says Mr. Strauss, the consultant. A new nursing program, for example, may bring in additional students and revenue, but it may not be enough to sustain a university through years to come, or to distinguish it from peers that are evolving more rapidly.

“No matter how big the internal community is thinking, you typically have to think bigger,” he says. “The definition of bold is not how different it looks from what you did last year. It’s how different it looks from what your competition is doing.”

If colleges are not looking for promising opportunities to transform themselves, Mr. Strauss says, they face “the threat of not acting on possibilities.” And that can lead to one the biggest risks of all: getting left behind.

Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.